Tuesday 9 February 2016, 15:00
Conference Room, 62 Juta Street, 1st floor, Braamfontein, Johannesburg
RSVP : comm.research@ifas.org.za

The point of departure for this research is a theoretical aim : analyzing the complex dialectic between religions and politics. That’s why we decided it was relevant studying relations of a Pentecostalist community in a township regarding democracy.

We will try to understand to which extent it can appear as counter-democracy in a context of precarity and social exclusion. While the church can complete the South African welfare state by providing different kinds of aid, it firstly highlights the limits of social democracy at the political scale, and it secondly illustrates how difficult it is to apprehend religion and politics as two absolute different orders. Last but not least, it can reveal the ambiguity of the dynamic of desecularization in the contemporary world since we assist to a process of reenchantment with this religious renewal.

Thibaut Dubarry is a postdoctoral fellow at EHESS-IMAF. His post doc research deals with Pentecostalism and democracy in two townships. After Sciences Po, he did a master at EHESS about gangs in the Cape Flats. His PhD was about militarization of violence in France, the USA and South Africa.